Author
Topic: KingMike's Translation projects. (Read 62523 times)

Lately pushing through with doing a heavily machine-assisted translation of Jungle Wars (don't intend to use that as a release translation, mostly a placeholder than anything).

Hey! I'm new around here but this is one of the only mentions of an ongoing hack of that game I managed to find! Did you continue working on it? I had started an in-place translation as a project to improve my Japanese , but I think trying to fit a translation in the original space is pretty futile, so I've been diving into trying to figure out how the game points to text and try and remap it.

As far as I could see, there is no easily discernable table of pointers, is that your experience as well ? Any idea on how one should try and figure out how the game look for the text strings? I've been staring at assembly code in BGB for a while but I can't seem to find a way to find out.

It would be a dream to be able to play Jungle Wars in English someday. It was the first JRPG I managed to play from start to finish in Japanese back in my pre-teenage days (of course, without understanding a single word).

I've tried to play it again with the limited knowledge of Japanese that I have today, but it's still not enough to fully enjoy it.

Thank goodness! I've been waiting since I was promised this for March 1994! As is typical for me, I can't help but like Shinseiki Odysselya II much better though. I've got a folder sitting around with early prodding on that one. If you hit anything you can't figure out, let me know. These false promises of old need to be set right!

As a child of the 80s, I very much grew up with mags like Nintendo Power. Looking back, I still don't really understand why they would list to the consumer the number of megs (as in, megabits just to make it extra confusing) a game was. Who cares? Even at the time, if a game was crappy it didn't matter how many megs it was or wasn't, andeven well into the SNES/MegaDrive years many of my favorite games were on NES and GameBoy, which obviously had games with small numbers of megs.

As a child of the 80s, I very much grew up with mags like Nintendo Power. Looking back, I still don't really understand why they would list to the consumer the number of megs (as in, megabits just to make it extra confusing) a game was. Who cares? Even at the time, if a game was crappy it didn't matter how many megs it was or wasn't, andeven well into the SNES/MegaDrive years many of my favorite games were on NES and GameBoy, which obviously had games with small numbers of megs.

I suppose it was just for marketing purposes. Some people probably would think that, the more megs in the cartridge, the better the game would be. Back in the day, a friend of mine bought the Lynx instead of the gameboy just because "lynx has a 16 bit cpu, man!" and after a while he ended up selling it (almost for peanuts) to buy a gameboy (sorry if some lynx lovers feel insulted, it's not my intention. It was a device with a lot of potential, but also some serious flaws).

Well, my first blind playthrough of a Japanese RPG, with no translation or FAQs or anything, is done.Crimson for the MSX. I have basically all the text translated with machine assistance.I don't know if anybody wants to look over my translation.The script dump is about 19KB, which seems to be all in-game text, minus the enemy names.The rest is just the start text and the ending.(this is the sort of game with very shallow text, with most places only having a few NPCs with a couple lines of text)A pretty decent game for being a fairly early DQ-type game, though nothing really amazing. As I posted on D-D already, the one downpoint is RNG being a determining factor in battles, especially against enemies you're not overleveled against.

Since I haven't worked on them in awhile, I think I'll just throw my beta progress on Indra, Akuma-kun and Castle Ayakashi onto the site.

If I recall the first two were finished minus some stuff like bad name translations, the latter lacking a title screen (someone had released another patch called Doman's Revenge) but otherwise complete.

I was about to release the Akuma-kun patch until I discovered a last-minute problem.It seems that, at the beginning of the game, trying to add Pixie to the party causes the game to freeze.It does not freeze when I selected it after I used a password to go to my final save position.Possibly an IRQ firing before the first IRQ finishes and it somehow overwrites the PRG bank mirror with an invalid value causing it to jump to garbage, but it's strange that it seems to only happen with Pixie and only in that one situation.I have also included an earlier beta from when it doesn't happen (though it looks like text wasn't translated which could be the reason).

Also, who did the title hack again on this? I think I remember but I want to be sure so I can credit them.I can't find it on my thread or the title screens thread, which is where I thought it would be, nor do I seem to have it in my email if it was sent that way.

Hello, I checked Akuma-kun and managed to beat it (thanks to your pass I didn't have to grind at the end - it's a fairly short game anyway). It seems that this bug you mentioned only keeps happening until

Spoiler:

you acquire items in the cave near China - it was Akuma's Corkscrew for me specifically.

Your diagnosis seems to be correct, as it never happens anywhere else/again after that bit is over.

I also made quite a few screenshots and sent them your way, along with a Wordpad file filled with suggestions, in case you wanted to improve the script somewhat. I haven't checked all the item/spell descriptions in-depth, I will likely return to those during the weekend. I may have missed something, naturally, but hopefully this will help you somehow with the project. I didn't know what the limitations were, but I tried to use as few words as possible, just in case. Sometimes I couldn't get the context fully (I know some Japanese, but it was the first time I played this game, so I couldn't compare it in any way), and I wasn't 100% sure about some suggestions. Either way, I hope the project goes well.

EDIT: Found some more stuff as well, in addition to what I had sent already, I just need to organize the next batch of files somewhat. I checked all the item/spell descriptions I stumbled upon, too. I intend to rewatch some parts of the show, in order to check how many of the names appeared therein. Either way, it's curious that this seems to be literally the only game based on that license.

Thanks for these patches! The manual expansion of Indra no Hikari ROM doesn't seem to work if one just follows the instructions in the readme verbatim. That's because the uploaded IPS patch doesn't alter byte 4 of iNES header (size of PRG ROM) correctly. Maybe just a stupid nitpick on my side, I dunno.

As a child of the 80s, I very much grew up with mags like Nintendo Power. Looking back, I still don't really understand why they would list to the consumer the number of megs (as in, megabits just to make it extra confusing) a game was. Who cares? Even at the time, if a game was crappy it didn't matter how many megs it was or wasn't, andeven well into the SNES/MegaDrive years many of my favorite games were on NES and GameBoy, which obviously had games with small numbers of megs.

Another game I've been working on is Crimson for MSX2.I have fully dumped the script and I've got at least a machine translation all written up for a starting patch.I'm looking into the technical parts.I think I got all the pointers detected (it's a game with pointers largely buried within code but I wrote a program to seek out the most of the pointers from code and manually detected the others. Only about three lines I couldn't find pointers but I think they may not be used anyways so perhaps they don't have pointers.Been reading up on MSX stuff and I think I've got the text routine basically fully documented. The various text routines seem to all use the same core, maybe only the final ending screen is different, I haven't looked at it yet.

Though once I managed to get the VRAM dumped, I found that despite using ASCII text codes it doesn't contain the full font.(I was able to convert a VRAM dump to Genesis tile format so I can at least view it in WindHex to check the data.) As part of the text routine was a long part that converts text codes into font VRAM addresses.So I guess I will have to figure out how the font is stored in the ROM and change it after all.

It might even be feasible to do a VWF on this, but I think I'll worry about polishing like that later.

One thing I do think about has to do with the "laser" printing animation the game does. It looks kind of cool but at the same time I'm thinking about removing it. Battles are pretty slow paced in this game due to being terribly RNG-dependent. And I'm sure the animation is slowing it down further. But I know that sort of thing should be an optional "turbo" hack afterwards if I can be done as easily as I suspect it can be now.

A couple other GB RPG games I started looking into as well, hoping they fall into "relatively small" games.Monster Maker 1 (maybe in the side of working through 3) and "Legend".

I only looked into MM1 after finding I had downloaded some NoA sales book from some site years ago and found the game had an announced but unreleased localization called Monster Master.Though it describes itself as a "card" game. And after a bit of playing, I'd say, yes, 3 was definitely the odd one out in that it was a more typical JRPG and certainly more plot development.

On the other end of progress, getting to the last bit of text-insertion stuff I need to work on to get the GUIs finished in RPG Maker. Then I get on finalizing the menus before leaving myself the very last piece of translation needed: the sample game story block. I had completed dumping it last year but writing an inserter for it will be the final major part.

A couple other GB RPG games I started looking into as well, hoping they fall into "relatively small" games.Monster Maker 1 (maybe in the side of working through 3) and "Legend".

I only looked into MM1 after finding I had downloaded some NoA sales book from some site years ago and found the game had an announced but unreleased localization called Monster Master.Though it describes itself as a "card" game. And after a bit of playing, I'd say, yes, 3 was definitely the odd one out in that it was a more typical JRPG and certainly more plot development.

There was also a spin-off Famicom Monster Maker game, wasn't there? I recall trying that one out a couple of years back. It seemed fairly big though, and it probably is in comparison to the GB entries. The card theme was pretty interesting from what I can remember, it felt pretty much nothing like other FC JRPGs. If the GB games are similar, they're probably quite fun to play.

So far the first GB Monster Maker game has been a rather frustrating game. I'm not sure it's the good or the bad kind of challenging. (it is the sort of game where your characters miss a lot and enemies can one-shot your party when they feel like it)

The magic system is rather backwards. You effectively have to plan while you're in town how you want to spend your MP for the next dungeon. That is, you need to spend MP to buy spell cards from a spell shop (which seem to have a bigger limit, I'm not sure if there's a finite limit but I imagine so. I know for items you're limited to six item cards per character). Spellcasters can only regain the spent MP by using the cards and then having the party rest at an inn.However, the inn is another bit of an inconvenience.See, you have your main player character that you select at the start of the game. Then you can hire up to two companions. (there are four party member slots, but I wonder if slot 4 is specifically reserved for events, such as one dungeon where you get a story PC for the dungeon) But when you rest at an inn, your hired members split and you need to pay again to get them to rejoin (when they rejoin, they recover the MP of consumed spell cards. Or more likely it recovers MP then deducts the value of remaining cards in hand, as inventory is retained). Though money isn't terribly hard to farm in this game so it's more of a nuisance.At the least the GB game has been the type to let you keep progress after failing, warping back to town and losing half your money.

It's looking the NES game as well allows only your main character (or 2 characters in the NES?) to level-up. And even then, level-ups only happen at events (like defeating bosses).

Again, MM3 goes the normal JRPG route, ditching the card theme and allowing all characters to gain EXP and level-up the standard way. Though it is seeming like characters do reappear between games (even the board game spinoff that I'd also like to do sometime. I had gotten as far as a half-working VWF.)

I spent way too long looking into fixing a minor issue while translating the scenario creation menus in RPG Maker.Turns out there are two event printing functions.

One that is used in the "preview" on the menu where you set sprites, etc.There it will print the first three events in a one-line format.My biggest hurdle has been editing Message events to have an extra line (to display the "Message:" tag on its own lineto give all dialogue lines the full width to print).

The last issue I was having was being able to move the cursor off the screen after deleting an event... and it turns out to be an original game bug!I have the capability to simply prevent the player from moving the cursor in this detected glitch state, forcing them to move it back into a non-glitch position to work around the glitch. But I wonder if it can be fixed.

So, to demo in the game.In the Sample Game, the test is Map 0 (the Yggdrasil Tree), top-most event.Choose to edit the event and scroll down to display event 13 (a message). It will only partially display (which I found out is using the "preview" version of the message print function when it detects the full message can't print, rather than the "full" print function).Scroll back up to event 6, so that only the first line of 13 fits on screen.Scroll back down to 12, and then delete it (first option of the R Menu). The cursor will be on event 12 (formerly #13, which still can't fully fit on screen).So now the cursor is on event 7 of the on-screen events. But in RAM it has recorded that only 6 events could fit on screen fully. My guess is that is why it doesn't scroll the events list when moving the cursor like it normally would.

Well, last week I reached a milestone in RPG Maker: all editor and game GUI text translated.So I had finally reached the last major obstacle: the sample game scenario inserter needs to be written.

I recall a last few bits after that like some touchup on the Turbo File menus and the title screen, but those are pretty low priority.With the scenario inserter, I'm going to try to make it thorough on error-checking so it can maybe (with the dumper) even be re-used to translate the Satellaview quests (when a combined with a tool on Satellablog which can rip the Satellaview game data and insert to a standard game ROM). The ones I know of are Jewel of Live and Cock-a-doodle.